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What Would You Like To See Next From Phoronix?

05-29-2011, 07:20 AM

Phoronix: What Would You Like To See Next From Phoronix?

With there just being seven days until Phoronix turns seven years old, it's time for an annual review. Aside from the ongoing what would you like to see next, your feedback is welcome regarding other improvements you would like to see made...

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1) .deb installer for Ubuntu of latest phoronix benchmarking test suite from site.
2) A (much) more intuitive and faster/easier solution for novice users (regarding the benchmarking test suite) on what to download, how to install, how to run a benchmark, which ones are available. Currently one has to read (tedious) documentation here and there, the installer I tried out like a month or 2 ago didn't even install on Ubuntu (10.10), the one Ubuntu ships with - is too old, and when I managed to install the latest one from the site - it told me I needed to install some other packages for it to work properly and then get some benchmarks from somewhere else to run them.. I mean it's not as easy and quick to get up and running as it should be, as Ubuntu is. To be massively successful imo one should strive to be as easy and quick to get up and running as possible (like Ubuntu).
Other than that, imo phoronix is the best linux news source, among other things because it doesn't feature articles like "top 5 reasons why bla-bla is better than bla-bla" and because while being rather technical it uses a language which non-tech savvy folks can understand (and because unlike slashdot it isn't involved in political propaganda).

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a scorecard section to more easily draw the &quot;witness portrait&quot; of my next laptop

Hello Michael,

Your site is awesome : it gives bleeding edge informations on a given technology or software...
But when the moment of a global hardware purchase comes, I struggle, and I think Phoronix could perhaps make my live easier.

For example :
. your site gives some "measure/facts" I don't find elsewhere, but paradoxally, I can only use it only as a qualitative information, because I have difficulties to use them for my bigger picture.
. as a "screaming for silent laptops" user, I Look for the best "non-gamer" ratio, which would be, let say :
"euros (sum of the components "HDD+RAM+CPU+battery")"
*"wi-fi surfing up-time"
/"boot time"
/"weight" (sum of the components ..)
/"max(components noise)",

==> Suggestion : Could Phoronix provide a sort of scorecard section (watt, euros, weight, boot time effect) on components it tests, so users could compute their optimal "bill-of-components" indicator on a spreadsheet (or web spreadsheet) ?

Ideal situation :
- I define my "ideal" ratio,
- I print the "weighted top 10" combinations that Phoronix provides me,
- then I go with that shopping list compass on my usual shop/webshop.
==> Phoronix provides me a digestible information
==> Phoronix gets more visitors traffic
==> Hardware manufacturer can get some "visitors ratio" indications from Phoronix to optimize their value proposition
==> It wouldn't require more work from the redactors than today as it's just rough summary datas.

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Cosmetic changes:
-First thing to do is fix the background. The transition from white to grey is broken. It goes a little like white... light grey... drank gray bar (few pixels long) and then a little lighter grey for the rest. This bad transition annoys me every time I look at the homepage.
-Second thing to fix is letting the forums have the same color scheme. Make everything as dark as the main page (my eyes are bleeding from the white).
-Round edges around everything. This is basically also like Slashdot. It's easyer on the brain.

Functional changes:
-Seperate rumor/speculation/inside info box (below news box). I enjoy rumors, but some people hate it.
-Login box on the main page like Slashdot.
-A direct link to the YouTube page below the embedded video. I use VLC now instead of Flash. I need a direct URL for VLC streaming.

Additions:
-AMD FLOSS Vs. Catalyst graph corner, with daily changes so you can compare performance and see how propietary and FLOSS progress/regress. This would be very cool. Maybe include daily nVidia blob Vs. Nouveau and even Intel to the mix. This would be a very cool performance tracker to check out on a daily basis
-Consistant test result lookup. Have a simple OpenBenchmarking integration corner so you can easly requist information about how different HW stacks up against each other and how peorformance goes up per time.

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honestly i don't think very much needs to change. i do think the forums need the same graphical appearance as the home page, but thats about it.

i would also prefer more articles that compare competing products within the same performance or price range, and more articles comparing windows products (such as windows itself or ntfs). so for example, compare an nvidia gtx 460 with an amd hd5750. i don't expect such tests to be done often because i understand this takes twice as long to write an article, but it helps give us more depth of comparison.